Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Transfers

Re:Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Tr... by mdorazio on Sunday September 09, 2018 @12:52PM (#17946697)

Not all, but a good chunk. Definitely less than half. Somewhere around 18% of current US GDP is healthcare spending [1], growing at around 5% year over year. Education spending is somewhere around 5% of GDP [2]. It's hard to figure out how much actual growth is occurring there since most of the ridiculous increases have been specifically in college, not in K-12 which is the bigger share. Total increase seems to be somewhere below 3% year over year growth. We can even add in military spending and not get to half. Thanks to this year's absurd 9% budget increase [3], military spending is now above 4% of GDP again.

So, healthcare + education + military accounts for around 27% of GDP and about 5.2% weighted average growth for that 27%. US GDP is up 4.2% annualized for Q2 this year, so that growth in our 3 categories is only accounting for maybe a third of total GDP growth.

[1] https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2017/02/16/spending-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_spending_...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/u-s-m...

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Re:Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Tr... by fspeech on Sunday September 09, 2018 @05:13PM (#17947816)

The Q2 4.2% is too convenient a number to make your point. On average US GDP growth has been around 2% over the last decade: http://www.multpl.com/us-real-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year

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Re:Beijing’s Three Options: Unemployment, Debt, or Wealth Tr... by mdorazio on Tuesday September 11, 2018 @09:29AM (#17959517)

And before that it was a consistent 3-4% average. Picking the decade following the largest recession in history as your base is also a bit convenient.

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